The Mount Athos Foundation of America (MAFA), founded in 2017 by the American Membership of the Friends of Mount Athos, is pleased to announce two scholarships (travel bursaries) of up to $1000 each to support research projects related to Mount Athos. It is MAFA’s preference to issue one grant to a man and one to a woman, provided that there are viable applications appropriate to the purposes of MAFA from both men and women.

Applicants must be conducting research related to Mount Athos that requires travel either to Mount Athos, or to a dependency of one of the Athonite monasteries, or to one or more institutions such as museums or research institutes for access to materials related to Mount Athos and essential to the completion of the applicant’s research project.

There is no restriction on what fields of research will be supported. For example, they may be ones that are traditional for Mount Athos, like byzantine and post-byzantine history, art, architecture, musicology, diplomatics and manuscript studies; Eastern Orthodox theology, literature, hymnology, monasticism, monastic spirituality, patristic studies, etc. They may also be in scientific or social-scientific subject areas like botany, geolology, forestry, anthropology or sociology, or an interdisciplinary field. This list is by way of example only; other fields of research are acceptable, as long as the project is focused on Mount Athos and the significance of the project to the applicant’s field of research is made clear.